Good Follow_up to My Last Post

This was in the comments section to the report I just mentioned:

Other than cancer decedents, time of death is essentially unpredictable. About 20% of the elderly will die from cancer. For those individuals, there typically is some period of predictable decline toward death.

Most of the rest of us will die from slowly progressive organ system failures: Congestive heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and similar. For those individuals, time to death is virtually impossible to predict, even for physicians with substantial experience with dying patients.

So people really do know when they are in their "final" year. Therefore controlling the health care costs in this "final" year is impossible. But we still can do a better job of making sure people's wishes are followed. The percentage of living wills ignored by medical professionals is appalling.